Wednesday January 5, 2005 7:00 pm

Sony Creates First OLED PDA And Won’t Share

Sony has created a new PDA, the Sony Clie VZ-90 using OLED (organic light emitting diode. OLEDs are made from organic material and are lighter, faster, thinner, and have better contrast than LCD’s while using less juice). The 3.8” 480x320 screen has a 1000:1 contrast ratio, check that number again, 1000 1 and 3 zeros. The buttons and controls slide out along the horizontal base of the unit, and can be hidden when not in use. Additional features include integrated stereo speaker, a CF slot, memory stick slot, wifi, IrDA and will play MPEG4 video, MP3 and ATRAC3 audio. It is just a shade over 4 inches wide, and 3 inches long and under an inch thick. It weighs a little more then half a pound. It will run smoothly with the included 64 mb of RAM and 128mb of flash, with a little of each given over to the operating system. According to Palm Infocenter, “Sony has announced they will no longer market or release handhelds for the US and European markets.” I guess this means even if you would part with the $820 dollars for a new PDA you would have to take courses in Japanese to use it.